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"... assuming that the radiation in a backscatter X-ray is about a hundredth the dose of a dental X-ray, we find that a backscatter X-ray increases the odds of dying from cancer by about 16 ten millionths of one percent. That suggests that for every billion passengers screened with backscatter radiation, about 16 will die from cancer as a result.

Given that there will be 600 million airplane passengers per year, that makes the machines deadlier than the terrorists."

NotSanguine writes "Nicholas Wade of the New York Times has written an article about a new DNA study that suggests the earliest Americans arrived in three waves, not one. 'North and South America were first populated by three waves of migrants from Siberia rather than just a single migration, say researchers who have studied the whole genomes of Native Americans in South America and Canada. Some scientists assert that the Americas were peopled in one large migration from Siberia that happened about 15,000 years ago, but the new genetic research shows that this central episode was followed by at least two smaller migrations from Siberia, one by people who became the ancestors of today's Eskimos and Aleutians and another by people speaking Na-Dene, whose descendants are confined to North America.' The study, published online (paywalled), investigated geographic, linguistic and genetic diversity in native American populations."

An anonymous reader writes "DirectTV has dropped all of Viacom's channels. This includes channels such as MTV, Comedy Central, and Nickelodeon. The drop is reported to be over a carrier fee dispute. It appears programming content can magically disappear from satellite too and not just from streaming services. I guess pirating and physical media is the only way to make sure the content we pay for doesn't disappear."Link to Original Source

MojoKid writes "Apple is pitching Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) as the cat's meow with over 200 new features "that add up to an amazing Mac experience," but that only applies if you're rocking a compatible system. Some older Mac models, including ones that are 64-bit capable, aren't invited to the Mountain Lion party, and it's likely because of the GPU. It's being reported (unofficially) that an updated graphics architecture intended to smooth out performance in OS X's graphics subsystem is the underlying issue. It's no coincidence, then, that the unsupported GPUs happen to be ones that were fairly common back before 64-bit support became mainstream."Link to Original Source

Stirling Newberry writes "This image shows "P5," the place holder name for a 5th natural moon of Pluto, a tiny sliver that orbits ~29,000 miles from its primary in a circular orbit. Other than Charon, Hubble has been the means of finding all of the known moons of Pluto."Link to Original Source

For fully laden 18-wheelers, it's closer to 10,000:1 in car damage to truck damage. The reason is that damage does not increase linearly with weight, but a much higher rate (I think it's proportional to weight^4). One source.

That's not what the scripturesays. If they were walking at the beach, there would be no reason to fear sinking, the boat would not have been threatened, nor would there be any reason to get back in the boat.

iPhone 3G owner here. Apple's updates made my phone go from snappy to slothful (2.3.1 ->3.1.3 ->4.0.1), with no legitimate way to downgrade. It's help like that I don't need, and that's why the phone I bought to replace it was Android.